Is it fair that Rotten Tomatoes constantly updates critical reaction scores?

[Wayne49]

You know I can clearly remember Batman Forever being both a critical and commercial hit. I couldn't hardly find anyone who didn't like it either allot or at least an improvement over the previous movie. Yet when you read the reaction score to the film today it's both dismal in critical and audience reaction. I think allot of that is fallout from Batman & Robin. So I guess my question is... Is it fair that Rotten Tomatoes constantly changes or adds new reactions to a film that is 20 years old without some context that this is not how people felt when it initially came out? I think this movie gets a bum wrap for that. Honestly I think B&R has always gotten a bum wrap as well, but it seems like it to took a much longer time for this film to get dragged down. Is that really a fair consensus since the true history books show it was popular for both critics and audiences? Isn't this revisionist history? 

[Edd Grayson]

I've no idea how Rotten Tomatoes' reasoning works, but too many people put their faith in such sites when judging a movie. 

[Wayne49]

Yeah, I guess it's one thing to see how a movie does on a critical basis when it's released, but who really cares what a critic thinks in 2015 to a film made for audiences in 1995? How objective is that and why do sites like Wikipedia use that current score and lump it with remarks from '95 to offer a consensus for the day? That seems inaccurate and pretty much revisionist history.

[The Laughing Fish]

It's because we live in an age where sites like Rotten Tomatoes, iMDB Top 200, and What Culture encourage people to be mindless consumers and follow trends. I've often said that people who use RT scores or whatever rating to justify why a film is good or bad do so because they lack the ability and the confidence to explain for themselves.

I think it should go without saying that you should like whatever you want. Don't get persuaded by what the critics or what popular opinion says.

[johnnygobbs]

I've no idea how Rotten Tomatoes' reasoning works, but too many people put their faith in such sites when judging a movie. 

There's nothing wrong in using it as a guide before seeing a movie.  If a film has a really low score and is hated by practically everyone I wouldn't be inclined to waste my hard-earned cash going to see it at the cinema in view of the prices.

But RT scores should not influence one's opinion of a film after they have seen it.  There will be those rare occasions in which we disagree with the vast majority of critical opinion on a particular film.  Most people hate The Wild Wild West and the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film for example, but I, whilst hardly considering them to be classics, actually enjoy both these movies regardless of the overwhelmingly negative opinion.

To give an even better example, Mars Attacks! is a movie with a low RT score that I don't merely like, but absolutely adore.  But being a Tim Burton movie featuring a great cast that gets zapped by Martians I was always going to see it at the theatre no matter what the majority of critics said. 

[Wayne49]

I think where I don't find a universal reasoning with Rotten Tomatoes (regarding a film I haven't seen yet) is defining intent versus objectivity. When a film is not liked well enough by critics or the audience, how can I know that was a natural reaction or more of a manipulated prejudice inspired to harm a film's reputation? As Laughing Fish was saying, in the social media age there is this herd mentality to belong to a collective opinion. Scary in many ways if you think about it. So if I'm a young person, and I haven't seen Batman Forever, if I take the Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 41% and audience score of 33% to assess a general point of view, how can I know that was the audience and critical reaction who saw it in 1995 or if that critical score is actually the end result from years of fan-boy backlash attributed to the resentment and disappointment over Batman & Robin? A point further underscored by the audience review which is what audience? The ticket buying public that went to this film when it opened? No... This is the angry online fan-boys who sign up on this website to get their angst paid forward by lowballing the movie. So the truth is I wouldn't be able to apply that much needed context unless I was considerably older and understood the forces in play here. So I don't know that I would use any feedback as a viable measure of a film's predictable quality.

[Edd Grayson]

I've no idea how Rotten Tomatoes' reasoning works, but too many people put their faith in such sites when judging a movie. 

There's nothing wrong in using it as a guide before seeing a movie.  If a film has a really low score and is hated by practically everyone I wouldn't be inclined to waste my hard-earned cash going to see it at the cinema in view of the prices.

But RT scores should not influence one's opinion of a film after they have seen it.  There will be those rare occasions in which we disagree with the vast majority of critical opinion on a particular film.  Most people hate The Wild Wild West and the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film for example, but I, whilst hardly considering them to be classics, actually enjoy both these movies regardless of the overwhelmingly negative opinion.

To give an even better example, Mars Attacks! is a movie with a low RT score that I don't merely like, but absolutely adore.  But being a Tim Burton movie featuring a great cast that gets zapped by Martians I was always going to see it at the theatre no matter what the majority of critics said. 

I was talking of people who hear a movie is bad because critics have said so, and they don't watch it to see for themselves. Or some who think a movie that they like is the best ever because it has a good score on RT or another site. 

[Slash Man]

I pretty much hate the way Rotten Tomatoes is set up to begin with. Of course it's inappropriate to judge a movie of the past by modern standards; that's essentially what they're doing here.

[thecolorsblend]

I've always thought it was BS myself. If you only follow the contemporaneous critical reaction to, say, the Empire Strikes Back, what you realize is it was probably 10 or 15 years before the Star Wars fanbase embraced that movie as their favorite. Before that time, it was the weird, darker-than-necessary art house Star Wars film. Those same qualities are why people love it today but it was a hell of a weird jump from Star Wars to Empire way back when. But Rotten Tomatoes doesn't reflect that. It only shows Empire's reputation... which, while admirable, isn't honest with history.

The other thing is that distorts history another way in that technically The Phantom Menace received a better contemporaneous critical reception than Empire did. A lot of people don't realize that but if records be checked, that's how it happened. But nobody will ever remember that.

The reason that's a crying shame is because history has spoken about both Empire and Menace. It loves Empire; Menace, not so much. People are aware of that but if RT is their only source, they won't be aware of the evolution that took place over a long period of time.

Similar arguments can be made about the Burton/Schumacher Batman films, Godfather's critical reception as compared to Godfather II and so forth. It's simply not an intellectually honest way to grade the material in my opinion.

[The Laughing Fish]

I've always thought it was BS myself. If you only follow the contemporaneous critical reaction to, say, the Empire Strikes Back, what you realize is it was probably 10 or 15 years before the Star Wars fanbase embraced that movie as their favorite. Before that time, it was the weird, darker-than-necessary art house Star Wars film. Those same qualities are why people love it today but it was a hell of a weird jump from Star Wars to Empire way back when. But Rotten Tomatoes doesn't reflect that. It only shows Empire's reputation... which, while admirable, isn't honest with history.

The other thing is that distorts history another way in that technically The Phantom Menace received a better contemporaneous critical reception than Empire did. A lot of people don't realize that but if records be checked, that's how it happened. But nobody will ever remember that.

The reason that's a crying shame is because history has spoken about both Empire and Menace. It loves Empire; Menace, not so much. People are aware of that but if RT is their only source, they won't be aware of the evolution that took place over a long period of time.

Similar arguments can be made about the Burton/Schumacher Batman films, Godfather's critical reception as compared to Godfather II and so forth. It's simply not an intellectually honest way to grade the material in my opinion.

This. Blade Runner is another example where it was panned critically when it was first released, but its reception drastically improved over time. Same thing with the Al Pacino version of Scarface. But does RT or Metacritic take those facts into account? I'd hate to see how the reception for Batman Returns would be like if it were released today. Batman Forever certainly wouldn't survive.

I'd go far to say that sites like Rotten Tomatoes has a toxic influence on film culture nowadays. In my opinion, they symbolise the "gamification" of films. It's no longer really about analysing the merits of a movie, it's about how much a percentage score a movie can get to prove how good or bad it is, or prove if it's better or worse than something else. And when people with certain agendas in favour or against a movie are on the losing side of a debate, the very first thing they do is refer to a score on whatever website to prove their opinion as "fact". When you do that, objective analysis goes flying out of the window, and you lose all credibility.

The most annoying thing is a site like RT has a binary system where it skews the mixed reviews by randomly deciding if it's "fresh" and "rotten", as a blogger mentioned when analysing the critical reaction to BvS.

http://comicandscreen.blogspot.com/2016/05/comparing-batman-v-superman-and-civil.html

It would be refreshing to see more people taking a stance against such sites, and judge films for themselves without being swayed by popular consensus. Want to watch something? I say do it on your own terms and crush the goddamn tomato!